by JA Andrews
The Wellstone finally moved on. A new memory filled the stone and the rest of the chaos was pushed back.
When Sini caught her mother’s face, she tried to pull away from it, as well. When nothing changed, she tried to hurry it forward faster. But the Wellstone seemed to recognize this as important, and the scene moved by at a gut-wrenchingly slow pace.
Her mother looked at her with an uncharacteristically tormented expression until it fell on the smashed half loaf of bread in Sini’s hands. Then the severity was back.
“That’s all? We can’t live on that.”
“I’ll go out again,” Sini began, holding out the bread.
“There won’t be enough,” her mother snapped. The anger in her voice was deeper. It burned more than her usual impatient answers. She lowered her gaze to the bread. “There won’t ever be enough.”
Her mother took the bread more gently than normal, turning Sini’s hands over to look at her scuffed palms. Dirt etched the lines in black. “Something must change.”
Fear filled her at her mother’s odd behavior. Sini opened her mouth to say she’d go over to the docks when her mother dropped her hands and turned away.
“Your father is outside.” Her voice was hard again. “Go to him.”
With her mother’s back turned like a wall, Sini slipped outside. It was strange to hear her father’s voice this early in the morning. He never woke before noon. Sini rounded the side of the shed and jerked to a stop.
He was speaking with Vahe. The wayfarer looking too bright and clean for an alley in the Lees. She stepped up as close to her father as she dared, and Vahe flashed her a smile that held more satisfaction than warmth.
“How would you like to see the world, Sini?” Vahe asked. When he held out his hand toward her thin trails of light streamed behind the rings on his fingers, just as they’d done during his show.
Sini shrank back behind her father.
“Go to the man.” Her father’s voice was slightly blurred from the night’s drinking. He pushed her forward and held out his other hand. “The silver.”
Sini froze, confused. He was trading her?
Vahe ignored him and took Sini’s hand. His fingers were thin and cold and hard. She tried to pull her hand back.
“You remember the fire from yesterday? It knew you were special. You don’t belong here in the filth of the Lees. Come join my family, and we will travel Queensland and the rest of the world. You’ll see the beautiful parts of cities, mountains, rivers, the sea.”
The sea? The sea didn’t really exist. How could there be nothing but water as far as you could see? Sini stopped pulling away and Vahe’s smile widened.
“We’re leaving Queenstown this morning, but I wanted to find you first. Come.” The word was part invitation, part command, but his hand was clamped over hers and he pulled her a step down the alley.
“The silver,” snarled her father.
Vahe gave him a contemptuous look and turned away. Two leather pouches, one on his hip, and one inside his vest, caught Sini’s eye. A clink from behind him told her there was a third tucked along his back.
The wayfarer was rich. He wore bright clothes. Cotton trousers dyed a greenish blue. A bright yellow shirt, even brighter than the little yellow flowers that grew in the field behind the butcher’s. An orange vest like a setting sun.
Sini’s father let out a cry of “Thief!” and lunged toward Vahe. The wayfarer sidestepped him smoothly and threw a punch.
Was this just a ploy to get the man’s money? Sini could help with that. She tugged at the hand he gripped, and slipped her other inside Vahe’s vest, working the pouch loose. Vahe didn’t notice.
By the weight of the pouch, even if it only held coppers, it was a fortune. Vahe’s hand locked on to Sini’s hand. Her father shoved himself up, his nose and lips bloody, still bellowing. Sini’s mother ran out from the shed. Sini flashed her a grin and dropped it into a nearby pile of trash where any sound it made was lost in the commotion. But instead of coming to help Sini, her mother rushed forward and jumped into the fray, beating at Vahe with a towel. Sini yanked at her hand with all her strength.
Vahe threw one more punch, sending Sini’s father sprawling. Her mother rushed to his side, but Sini still couldn’t free her arm. Vahe pulled her behind him as he strode down the alley.
Sini called out to her mother, reached back, but her mother met her gaze for only a moment before twisting her head away to look for the pouch.
Vahe’s steps were long and Sini had to scramble to stay upright next to him. Sini stared at her mother, trying to understand why she didn’t follow. She looked up one last time before Sini was pulled around the corner, and though there was something in her face Sini had never seen before, she stayed crouched by her father until the dingy boards of the inn blocked her from view.
A dart of anguish cut into Sini, an emotion the Wellstone didn’t touch. It only took the images and the sounds, the feel of the cold dirt under her feet, the tightness of Vahe’s hand. But it disregarded the utter confusion and panic that had filled Sini that day, and it paid no attention to the way the last expression she’d ever seen on her mother’s face made her feel now that she understood it. The poverty must have been impossible, with so many mouths to feed in that broken alley. Her mother’s face had been filled with guilt and desperation. But it was the relief woven through it that Sini couldn’t bear.
Sini tried to catch her breath as the memories poured along faster, now. Flashes of her tiny cell in the wayfarer’s wagon, forests, mountains, the sea stretching out in endless glittering light. And then another endless sea, this time of grass.
Clay buildings of Porreen rushed past until a red-haired Roven man stood before her. Killien’s beard had small braids hidden in it, and his face was eager. The gems in the silver rings on his hands glowed, but none of them trailed light as they should.
“I’m Killien, and I know you feel like you’ve been torn from your home, but I assure you, you have been brought to the place you belong. Here you will never be hungry or cold.” Beside him stood Lukas. His brown hair and short beard were styled like the Roven, but he wore a grey tunic instead of leather, and he looked at Sini with a desperation he was trying hard to mask. “Here we recognize that like Lukas, you have amazing powers, and we’ll train you to use them.” Killien gestured to a wall of books. “Can you read?”
Sini shook her head and Killien grinned. “Then we’ll teach you.”
The image shifted to a hallway as she followed Lukas.
“The room between Rett and me is empty.” He was easily twenty, at least ten years older than her. He walked with a slight limp and was at least ten years older than her—easily twenty. But it was the first time since she’d been pulled from the alley that someone looked at her with genuine kindness. “It’s not as bad as it seems right now. There’s always good food and clothes, even if they’re grey. We’ll teach you to read and you can help me with my research. We’ll see what kind of magic you can do. If you’re like Rett and me, Vahe woke it up but you can’t do much yet. That’ll change in the next few months.” He glanced down at her. “I know it’s a lot. When I came here there was no one to explain things. Rett is—well, you’ll meet him. It was hard. But whatever you need, come find me, alright?”
“What am I supposed to do here?” Sini asked.
“Get stronger at magic and prove to Killien you’re useful. If you can do that, everything will be fine.”
“And if I can’t?”
Lukas shot her a tight smile. “We’ll make sure you do.”
A different sort of pang thrummed inside Sini. Her mother’s face, she wanted nothing more than to forget. But Lukas—the face Lukas had shown her that first day—that she wanted to remember. Back before the anger had festered in him. She wanted to remember the kindness and protection he’d offered, and continued to offer her, for years. To remember the excitement in his face while they were translating runes or learning some new form of magic.
The stone responded. The motion slowed and the image grew more vibrant.
“I can do the mirroring, but I’ll need you to put the fire into the stone.” Lukas set another red glowing stone next to it.
Sini kept her hands clasped behind her. “How much fire?”
“A lot, Sin. Or I’d do it myself.”
“I can find the energy, but it won’t go into the stone. Let me give it to you instead.”
Lukas shook his head. “I can’t do both things at once. You fill it. I’ll shape it. You know you can access more fire than I can.” As it always did, bitterness tinted his voice when he mentioned that fact. Had she noticed it back then? She kept her mouth closed. It was useless to tell him again that there was fire in the very air around them. It filled the sunlight, it even trickled through the moonlight and starlight at night.
One time she had burned his hand terribly. After that, she’d learned to keep the flow to a gentle drip if he needed any. She’d asked him once how he knew when there was too much fire, but he spoke of broken stones and burned skin. That hadn’t really been her question.
But she bit back any questions she had, lest she start another rant about how stonesteeps and Keepers secreted knowledge away, making it almost impossible to even find books about it.
“Maybe you could get it started,” Sini began.
He gave her an impatient look, but set his finger on the quartz. A bit of fiery light trickled into it and a dim purple glow started in its core. Sini reached out for the energy that danced around the room, scattering with the sunlight. There was more even in this dim place than the stone could possibly hold. She began to draw it in, letting it seep into her arms, her face, her neck. She set a fingertip on the stone just where Lukas had, looking for remnants of the path he’d made into it. She found a thin trace of it and poured the fire into it. But the path was closing and most of the fire ran across the surface in wisps of pink mist. She knew Lukas couldn’t see them, so she poured out more and more, until her fingertip burned and the pink light flowed across the surface of the gem like a waterfall. The thinnest trickle of light flowed into the stone and it slowly produced a glow Lukas could see.
He gave a grunt of approval and set his own finger on the quartz. The light inside shifted and changed. “More, Sini. I need a lot more.”
She pulled some of the sunlight from outside. It gushed out of her fingertip so brightly she squinted. The glow of the stone increased again, but most of the pink light poured off and disappeared into the air.
Lukas made an impatient noise and she tried to push more, but the path closed completely and the light in the stone faded.
“No!” Lukas yelled, grabbing at the stone.
He leaned on the table, his hair hanging down covering his face. It was a long moment before he spoke. “You’ve got to work on this, Sini.” He glanced up and saw her face, and his expression softened. “Go out the back so you won’t run into Killien. I’ll tell him…we’re still working on it.”
She nodded and hurried toward the door, anxious to be gone.
She was almost out of the room when he spoke, low and urgent. “We have to fix this. Before Killien finds out.”
She nodded without looking back and ducked out of the door.
The familiar dull sense of inadequacy sat in her stomach. The next few years of life with the Roven flashed past. Learning to read, learning runes. Discovering she could heal small injuries, then more serious ones. She and Lukas bent over a new book, the thrill of learning new ways to use burning stones. Moment after moment of the life she’d had on the Sweep with Lukas and Rett.
She trickled more vitalle into the Wellstone, offering it direction through her memories. Offering it as much of Lukas as she could remember. To her surprise, the Wellstone followed her lead eagerly.
As time went by she noticed a change in Lukas she’d never seen before. He grew angrier, more impatient. Never with her, but with everything else. With her he was still enthusiastic and kind. But he grew belligerent behind Killien’s back. His plans and his research became more vicious.
Vahe’s face appeared again, telling a story in his wagon parked outside of Porreen. Sini’s heart gave a lurch and she saw Lukas’s face, twisted in hatred.
No.
She pulled at the memory. Not that one.
The Wellstone ignored her and drew more of it out. Lukas picking a small topaz out of his collection of stones.
No.
Sini yanked at it, trying to stop the Wellstone, but she was utterly helpless. In desperation she flung a different memory at it. Lukas learning about compulsion stones, studying whether they would work on a dragon.
The Wellstone paused like an animal catching a new scent. For a heartbeat both memories clambered with each other for attention. Sini gently added some energy, strengthening the thought of the compulsion stones, and the Wellstone hurried past Vahe and eagerly followed the new path.
Sini let out a breath and let the stone follow her memories to the bitter end, when Lukas flew out of the enclave on the dragon. A part of her watched what the stone learned, but another part wondered at the vast universe of knowledge spread out around her. Without her attention, the stone ran through all her memories of the Stronghold up to tonight.
A weariness started to grow in her. She lost her hold on the memories and the stone began to pull back from her. The chaos began to swirl again.
Wait!
The stone ignored her. Bits of her memories flashed past, connected to other unfamiliar ones by thin threads.
Threads. The Shield followed the threads. The Wellstone was indexing the memories. Maybe, if she helped, it would guide her to something interesting.
She started with the dragon. Letting vitalle continue to seep into the stone, she reminded it that Alaric already had met that dragon, and the stone lapped up the idea. A blur of color and sound settled, and Sini stood in a dark valley staring up to a sky filled with stars. Except for one spot where they were blotted out. The darkness spread until she could see a glint of red hurtling down toward them.
Ayda, alive and glittering with a sort of starlight herself, stood in the middle of a blackened swath of grass, her face turned up toward the dragon.
The creature dove toward the elf. Alaric had told her the story more than once, but to see Ayda stand there, brushing aside flames and knocking the dragon to the ground—Sini barely breathed.
The Wellstone knit bits of Sini’s memory to this one. And others which must have been Will’s from the enclave. The dragon became more whole somehow, more real. His scales glittered with ripples of deep red. He grew more vivid, more wild and savage.
This was the creature Lukas controlled.
It was harder this time, but she pulled up her memory of the twins at their breakfast that morning, and the stone eagerly began to connect it to a vast web of memories. She pulled her way along the threads, watching the twins grow younger, their beards darken to brown, their hands grow straighter and stronger. She followed them back until they were two boys, less than ten years old, wandering the streets of a foreign town, chattering with everyone they found.
Seeing them in Gringonn, even though the town was dingy and the landscape past it dull, shifted something in her. The country became a real place, the people around the twins became real lives with real hardships.
The sheer complexity and length of their lives sobered her. The years she’d known them were so little of what they had lived. Her claim on them felt weaker, even as they became richer, fuller people. For the first time since breakfast, she felt that the idea of only seventeen pages left was a great accomplishment. An act of love almost finishe
d, and the chance for them to rest well-deserved.
An exhaustion began to grow in her mind. It was harder to hold the memories she wanted to see, and she let the twins drift away into the chaos. She was about to step out of the Wellstone when she remembered Chesavia.
With all the effort she could muster, she got the stone’s attention and reminded it of the book of Chesavia’s quotes that she’d received from the Shield. The stone shifted and a latticework of images spread out before her, stretching as far as she could see in every direction. Memories tied to other images, piled on top of each other, strung together in such a mesh of connections that she didn’t know where to start. Images butted up against each other, fragments of words and songs swam past mostly unintelligible.
The word “sunlight” caught her attention. She was so tired she felt a bit like she was moving through molasses. Grabbing the memory required so much more strength than the earlier ones. Finally, it came into focus.
The memory was of someone talking to a young woman—Chesavia?— outside the Stronghold.
“I can almost see it in the sunlight,” she said, running her fingers through the air above her. A silver moon-shaped ring glittered on her finger. “I can almost reach it. Why does no one talk about the sunlight?”
The person let out a man’s laugh. “Because no one but you sees anything in it.”
Sini clung to the memory. Yes! Why did no one see what was in the sunlight?
She tried to hold it, but her grip on the moment weakened and the image slipped away, sinking into the swirl of memories.
The web of images stretched away from her again. One of her memories of Lukas began to float away. He was holding Killien’s sword, glancing nervously over his shoulder.
“Touch it, Sini.”
The sword was crude compared to the other weapons Killien used. The hilt roughly carved wood, the blade unpolished and full of irregularities. It looked like something that would belong to some farmer, not the leader of the Morrow Clan. Except it was encased in a faint blue glow.